The Rental Roundtable

After about 15 years at Walmart and Samsung, Nic Liu came home to help open the second location of the rental company his grandmother started in 1988. In this episode I sat down with Nic, director of business strategy at Dot's Rentals & Sales, to talk about bringing corporate process to a family business, the early lessons of a new location, and keeping core values sacred while everything else changes.

Some of the best ideas in rental come from people who started on the other side of the counter. In this episode I sat down with Robert LeVar, operations manager and partner at American Rental, to talk about building a drive-thru rental counter, using rerents to test new markets, and why every division of his business runs its own P&L.

You can run a profitable rental company and still go broke. In this episode I sat down with Brenden Moran, an equipment and event rental business coach, to talk about fixing cash flow, building a team that sticks, extreme ownership, and how to scale a rental company without the chaos.

Dan Crowley runs peer groups for hundreds of independent rental owners, so he hears what operators are actually doing before it shows up in anyone's data. Back for a record fifth appearance, the owner of Peer Executive Groups breaks down where AI is already changing rental operations: the counter process going from seven clicks to zero, the jobs it fills instead of replaces, and how the best operators now use data to see what's coming, not just what already happened.

Most people who want to start a rental company stall on the capital and the risk. James Polkinghorne started James Equipment in Tennessee with one skid steer and a "rent me" sign, then grew it past 70 machines. He breaks down how he bootstrapped the fleet with no money down, found the contractor market the nationals overlooked, and survived the thankless early years.